Like the ABBA musical, “Songs for a New World” is a collection of songs that weren’t originally written for a play, massaged into an evening of theater.

But you won’t hear lightweight, cheery numbers in the International City Theatre’s show opening tonight at the Center Theater in Long Beach.

Life is tough for the characters who inhabit “Songs,” and then they die.

In a recent phone interview, the playwright, Jason Robert Brown, said, “That doesn’t happen to be my point of view, nor do I think I particularly espouse that. I know there are similar thoughts to that in `The River Won’t Flow’ (one of the numbers), but it’s about these two people who are sort of fighting over a point because they won’t come together.”

Other songs feature characters who are perched on a ledge ready to jump; are ungrateful and always want what they can’t have; are afraid to take chances because of a father’s business failure; or are complaining about how women use tears to manipulate men.

Even a funny song about Mrs. Santa Claus has her complaining that her husband cares more about his reindeer than her.

“Each of the songs posits a sort of central problem,” said Brown. “There’s an obstacle that people can’t get past.”

There doesn’t seem to be much uplifting stuff here.

“That’s true,” said Brown. “I think there’s a journey to the piece, and at times that journey gets dark, but I think that it’s ultimately a very positive show.

“What happens toward the end of the show is there’s a song called `Flying Home,’ which is where a young man needs sort of the group in order to, in a metaphorical sense, ascend into heaven,” he said. “And `Hear My Song’ is really the one that brings the whole show together. Each of the members of the community asks other people to sort of support them and listen to them and share with them. And that, I think, sums up the whole piece very well.”

Doesn’t “Hear My Song” basically say that life is full of pain but listen to me anyway and maybe it will help a little?

“I’m not quite that down on it,” said Brown. “What I’m certainly not is Pollyanna in any respect, and I don’t think the show is that. But I think the show is that ultimately people survive through the music that they create together.”

Brown says the theme running through “Songs” is that to get through this vale of tears, you need community.

“It’s very much a piece about people trying to find their way on their own initially, and, ultimately, together,” he said. “I think it posits that everything’s sort of impossible by yourself, but it’s marginally doable if you band together.”

He wrote the songs when he was between ages 20 and 25, and then he put them together in this form as sort of a resume, to show his qualifications.

“That’s sort of how I thought of it at the time. It was a way to introduce my work to the world,” Brown said.

The strategy of “Songs” apparently worked. After it opened off-Broadway in 1995, Brown went on to write “Parade,” which won him a Tony Award for best score of 1999, as well as many other projects. He now lives in Los Angeles, where he’s part of the adjunct faculty of the USC School of Theater.

A production of “Parade,” a musical about the true story of a Jewish man who was lynched in Marietta, Ga., in 1913, is at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles through Nov. 15.

Though “Songs” doesn’t have a plot, “there’s what I call a sort of emotional narrative that draws the show forward,” Brown said. “There’s a reason to follow it from one end to another, as opposed to just 16 random songs. But that sort of depends on the production, I guess.”

Brown, who has a child, said that after he wrote “Songs,” he changed his mind about a lot of the views expressed in the show, but then he came full circle and now believes he was right the first time. But he denies he’s a cynic.

“I don’t think I ever was, and I’m less so now,” he said, “just because it’s hard to be a cynic when you have a beautiful young child looking up at you every day.

“But what I still feel to be true is that you need people around you. You do need to be supported. Cliche notwithstanding, no man is an island.

“I will naturally step away from feeling that for a while, and then I just discover that I can’t survive on my own without the support that I get from my friends and family and my community.”

Songs for a New World

What: Musical revue by Jason Robert Brown, presented by International City Theatre.

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